What is a free and open internet, and who keeps it open?
May 2, 2023
Aron Wagner
CEO & Co-Founder
A free and open internet is one where you can reach any lawful site, and publish lawful content, without a company in the middle blocking it, slowing it down or charging extra to carry it. In the US, a court set aside the federal net neutrality rules on January 2, 2025, and those rules only ever covered your internet provider.
Hosts, CDNs and DNS providers were never covered, and they're the companies that can take a site offline for every reader at once. For them, the only rule is the contract you signed.
What does "open internet" mean?
In US policy, "open internet" has meant net neutrality: rules for the company that sells you your connection. They come down to three things:
- No blocking. Your provider can't stop you from reaching a lawful site or app.
- No throttling. It can't slow one site down to favor another.
- No paid fast lanes. It can't take money from a site to deliver that site's traffic ahead of everyone else's.
If your provider decides who gets through, the web rewards whoever can pay the gatekeeper or please it. We'd rather it rewarded whoever builds the better thing.
Is net neutrality still the law in the US?
Not at the federal level. The FCC adopted its latest version, the Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet order, on April 25, 2024. On January 2, 2025, the Sixth Circuit set that order aside. It held that broadband providers offer only an "information service," which the FCC can't regulate that way. In July 2025 the FCC deleted the leftover rules, calling them rules that "never went into effect and were struck down by the Sixth Circuit in early 2025."
Some states kept their own. California's law, passed in 2018, is still in its civil code. It bars internet providers there from blocking lawful content, from impairing or degrading lawful traffic and from paid prioritization.
Which parts of the internet can take a site offline?
A website reaches a reader through a stack of companies. In 2017, after Cloudflare dropped The Daily Stormer, its CEO Matthew Prince listed them: content creators, platforms, hosts, transit, CDNs, DNS, registrars, ISPs and more. "Any of the above could regulate content online," he wrote.
Net neutrality reached one of those layers:
| Layer | What it does | Covered by a neutrality rule? | A dated example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Internet provider (ISP) | Sells the reader their connection | Federal rules set aside in January 2025; still in some states, like California | |
| DNS and registrar | Points your domain name at your servers | No | |
| CDN and security | Caches and shields your site at the edge | No | Cloudflare terminated The Daily Stormer in August 2017 and blocked Kiwi Farms in September 2022 |
| Host or cloud | Runs your servers, storage and databases | No | AWS suspended Parler in January 2021 |
| Platform | Social networks, app stores, marketplaces | No | TriggerHill, a marketplace for gun owners, was restricted from both big mobile app stores in 2024 and moved its hosting to us |
Cloudflare called both decisions dangerous. Of Kiwi Farms, Prince wrote that blocking it was "a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with." Agree with them or not, those decisions were the company's to make, and no rule said otherwise.
Does the First Amendment protect you from your host?
No. The First Amendment limits the government, not the companies you buy hosting from. When Parler asked a federal court to make AWS restore its service, the judge denied the request on January 21, 2021. The order notes that Parler wasn't claiming a First Amendment violation, because those rights "exist only against a governmental entity, and not against a private company like AWS." It was a ruling on emergency relief, not the final word on the case, and Parler's claims were antitrust, breach of contract and interference with business, not free speech.
How do you read a host's acceptable-use policy?
Ask three questions:
- Does it name what's banned, or keep a catch-all? A list of named things is a rule you can check yourself against. Words like "objectionable" let the host decide later.
- Where does each line come from? A ban that follows the law is decided by the law. A ban that follows taste is decided by whoever's on shift.
- Do you get notice before a shutdown? Look for a window to fix a problem before they suspend you, and then look for the exceptions to it.
Here's ours, read the same way. Our Acceptable Use Policy names nine things:
| Banned | Where the line comes from |
|---|---|
| Promoting violence | The law: speech "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action" isn't protected, the Supreme Court's test in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) |
| Infringing intellectual property | The law |
| Defamation | The law: false statements that harm someone's reputation aren't constitutionally protected |
| Human trafficking or illegal sex work | The law |
| Selling illegal goods | The law where the buyer and seller live |
| Distributing harmful software | The law: the policy names the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act |
| Phishing, spam and fraud | The law |
| Inflicting psychological harm or invading privacy | Partly the law (the policy names revenge porn), partly our call: it also covers content "intended primarily to injure another" |
| Doxing | Our call, to protect people's right to speak anonymously |
Seven follow the law. Two go further. Plenty of doxing is legal, and "intended primarily to injure another" reaches past any statute. Both lines are about targeting a person. None of the nine is about an opinion.
Our Services Agreement calls cutting off service "a drastic remedy that impacts the freedom of information to be transmitted and shared." A breach gets 14 days' written notice to fix it before we suspend. The exception: we can suspend without notice for "operational, security, or other material risk," or when a court orders it. A server attacking other customers doesn't get two weeks.
So who keeps the internet open?
Right now, no federal rule does. Every company in the stack writes its own rules, and the open internet is whatever those rules add up to. Ours fits in one line on our homepage: we're in the business of hosting, not content moderation. If you're choosing a host with that in mind, start with how to deplatform-proof your business.